High SARS-CoV-2 viral load is associated with a worse clinical outcome of COVID-19 disease

Abstract

COVID-19 severity and progression are determined by several host and virological factors that may influence the final outcome of SARS-CoV-2-infected patients. The objective of this work is to determine a possible association between the viral load, obtained from nasopharyngeal swabs, and the severity of the infection in a cohort of 448 SARS-CoV-2-infected patients from a hospital in Madrid during the first outbreak of the pandemic in Spain. To perform this, we have clinically classified patients as mild, moderate and severe COVID-19 according to a number of clinical parameters such as hospitalization requirement, need of oxygen therapy, admission to intensive care units and/or exitus. Here we report a statistically significant correlation between viral load and disease severity, being high viral load associated with worse clinical prognosis, independently of several previously identified risk factors such as age, sex, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, and lung disease (asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease). The data presented here reinforce the viral load as a potential biomarker for predicting disease severity in SARS-CoV-2-infected patients. It is also an important parameter in viral evolution since it relates to the numbers and types of variant genomes present in a viral population, a potential determinant of disease progression.